MANCHESTER, Conn.

RISING OIL and gasoline prices are making nearly everyone go crazy, most of all America’s politicians.

Even as President Bush was visiting Saudi Arabia and begging that country to increase oil production last month, the U.S. Senate was defeating legislation to open domestic Arctic and coastal areas to oil and natural-gas drilling. The Saudis must consider Americans to be spoiled brats who think that the world owes them a living.

The Saudis are supposed to drill for us because we refuse to summon the political will to drill for ourselves.

Of course, Congress has begun holding hearings to bully oil-industry executives about their recent ample profits. Nobody in authority notes that the biggest profiteer here is government itself, which, through federal and state excise taxes, makes about three times as much per gallon of gasoline as the oil companies do.

Some members of Congress, including Connecticut Rep. John Larson and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, want to outlaw or regulate investment in oil on commodity exchanges by “speculators” — a term that seems to include not only the notoriously opportunistic “hedge funds” but also traditional investment funds that handle pensions and endowments. While investment in oil and other commodities has exploded over the last year, these members of Congress don’t understand or acknowledge a major reason for it — a desire by investors to protect themselves against the severe decline in the value of the U.S. dollar.

Oil and oil products are hardly the only things whose prices have soared lately; nearly all commodities are up sharply, with the Commodity Research Bureau index reporting an increase of 37 percent in a year as the dollar’s value against other currencies having fallen about 12 percent. But Congress has yet to interrogate wheat farmers, copper miners and pizza makers.

Yes, there now is plenty of speculation in commodities generally and in oil particularly, and some of it has been facilitated by loose regulation, notably in regard to money that can be borrowed for essentially speculative purposes. But there long has been speculation in all markets, and where were these members of Congress a year or two ago when the centers of speculation were real-estate and government bonds, markets in which so many of their constituents and campaign contributors were getting rich at the expense of people who needed housing and modest savers who were relying on interest income?

Regulation of credit for speculative purposes is always worth reviewing, especially after years of the U.S. government’s general failure to regulate markets. But those members of Congress who propose to outlaw “speculation” in the oil markets are distracting from their own responsibility for that speculation and for the inflation that is now rampant even as the government falsifies its cost-of-living statistics so that inflation might be concealed.

This responsibility falls heavily on Senator Lieberman, who has become an enthusiastic part of a national administration that has bankrupted the country with unpayable debt in pursuit of a mistaken imperial war and a policy of borrowing rather than taxing for current expenses. This debt has flooded the world with U.S. government bonds that are starting to be used as money to buy real things. Spurred by the United States, the world’s money supply is vastly outpacing production of goods. While the U.S. pays no explicit tax for the war in Iraq and for ever-increasing government largess, inflation — currency debasement — is how those things are being paid for.

Back in Connecticut, Governor Rell and the General Assembly will preside over another increase in gasoline taxes as the state’s wholesale tax on oil products is to rise from 7 to 7.5 percent on July 1. Connecticut’s combined state taxes on gasoline — the excise tax, 25 cents, and the wholesale tax — already add up to nearly 51 cents per gallon, or about 12 percent of the price. When asked about the wholesale tax, the governor and legislators wring their hands, but privately they must love it, because it is a hidden tax, built into the price by wholesalers and raising about $250 million for the state each year even as it is mistaken by the public as the responsibility of the oil companies rather than the politicians who enacted it and refuse to freeze or reduce it, or even just fold it into the excise tax that is posted at the gas pump, where people might see it and understand it.

Government could do many things to ease the burden of energy costs. But government is not likely to do anything as long as it is so much easier for elected officials to demagogue about oil companies and “speculators.”

Chris Powell, a frequent contributor, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.